


Love and Fishing

by AstridContraMundum



Series: Ere I turn away . . . [3]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Episode: s06e03 Confection, M/M, Morse drops on by for another unannounced visit, Slow Burn, as in barely perceptible, but not for much longer, really slow burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-29 14:16:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21411532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: It was rather like inviting a stray kitten into the kitchen for a bowl of milk, only to turn around and find that it had transformed, while your back was turned, into a large tiger, golden-eyed and only semi-tamed, rolling luxuriously on your sofa as if demanding a belly rub.
Relationships: Endeavour Morse/Max DeBryn
Series: Ere I turn away . . . [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1508819
Comments: 18
Kudos: 65





	Love and Fishing

Ordinarily, it was Max’s favorite time of day, that careful hour between evening and night—nothing to do but to savor the quiet of a house, all tidied up, or to step out into the garden, where the twilight softened the greens into shadows, creating a shift in the spectrum, making it almost to look as if it truly were—as he often felt it was—an enchanted place.

But tonight, Max felt as if his equilibrium was off.

The way Morse had said them, those three words, seemed to reverberate through his thoughts, ghosting somewhere about the edges of his mind.

_"You don’t say."_

It was as if the words had fallen like stones between them, Morse’s low and rolling voice so much heavier than what was typical of the chap.

Usually, Morse’s tone was sharp and quick...

_“Anything suspicious?”_ he would ask, keeping his fair distance across a room.

Or else playful and triumphant, like a schoolboy who had earned a gold star.

_“I think the table’s set for two, and her guest hasn’t touched her tea.”_

And the way, too, that Morse had looked down upon the corpse, with a sense of utter finality—when his usual response was too turn away—seemed all the more worrying.

It was as if he had moved to some other place, hiding behind that mustache.

To a place beyond caring.

Max wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Wasn’t quite sure what to _do_ about it.

On the last occasion that he had tried to help the fellow out of the doldrums, Max had gotten quite a bit more than he had bargained for.

It was on the night that Max had attended Morse's concert, when Morse was sequestered out at Whitney. They had gone up to the bar for one final drink, when Morse, passing him his glass, pressed his fingertips across the knuckles of Max’s outstretched hand, brushing them back with a touch that was as light as feathers, but that still managed to send his nerves singing to attention.

Max might have passed it off as an accident, as a figment of his imagination, if it wasn’t for the look in Morse’s eyes, which suddenly seemed as two large kaleidoscopes, spinning with every hue of blue imaginable, as if they might swallow Max whole, if they could, and bury him alive in their depths.

It wasn’t that Morse wanted _him_, exactly.

He just wanted _something._

Max had felt for Morse in his loneliness, but he was not at all inclined to allow himself to be used to fill the need, or the gap, or whatever the hell it was, that caused Morse to look at him in such a way. He valued their growing friendship—and himself, quite honestly—far more than that.

It was rather like inviting a stray kitten into the kitchen for a bowl of milk, only to turn around and find that it had transformed, while your back was turned, into a large tiger, golden-eyed and only semi-tamed, rolling luxuriously on your sofa as if demanding a belly rub.

Max huffed a rueful laugh at the aptness of the image and set the last of the dishes into the drying rack. He was just beginning to pack away the leftovers from his dinner when a hesitant knock sounded upon the door.

He frowned softly to himself. He hadn’t been expecting anyone, and the remoteness of his house, far on the outskirts of the city, tended to deter casual visitors.

When he opened the door, he was both surprised, and not surprised, to find Morse on the threshold, doing an odd little dance, as if he was entertaining thoughts of darting back to his car.

“Morse?” Max asked. 

Morse looked at him, his blue eyes wide in the light of the porch lamp, as if he were slightly baffled that Max should be there, here in his own home. 

Then the man seemed to recover himself.

“Dr. DeBryn,” he said, nodding curtly, clasping his hands in front of him and standing up tall, suddenly all business. “I just wanted to stop by because it’s come to my attention that . . . that is . . . I . . . I realized I never thanked you.”

_“Thanked me?” _Max asked.

“For filling me in on the autopsy report the last time I was here. I know I dropped by rather unexpectedly, and that you needn’t have extended me that courtesy, and . . . well. . . . I wanted to thank you.”

_Extended him the courtesy?_ My, my, we were standing on ceremony, weren’t we?

Funny, too, really, that Morse should thank him for having obliged him even though he had troubled him at home by .... troubling him at home.

Max forced himself to suppress a smile. No point in making the poor chap feel even more wrong-footed than he already did.

“Would you like to step in?” Max said. “I was just going to have some tea.” 

“No. I won’t. I didn’t mean to disturb your evening. It just struck me that I never thanked you. That’s all.”

_Disturb his evening?_ Oh, dear. How formal. 

“Don’t be so ridiculous, Morse,” Max said. “You’ve come all of this way. You may as well step in and have a bit of dinner, too. Save me the trouble of packing the leftovers away, hmmmm?”

“Oh. Well," Morse said. He seemed to shift back and forth slightly on his feet. Then he gave a small nod. "Well. All right. Thank you.”

Morse stepped inside, then, with an uncertain air, as if he was perfectly willing for Max to tell him what it was that he should do next, as if he didn’t know quite what he was doing there, or how he had even come to be there.

Which perhaps he didn’t.

The best course would be to behave as if this was all perfectly natural, as if Morse stopped by every day.

Besides, if Morse were to leave feeling as if he’d been a bother, he’d torment himself about it all the way back to the section house, and then, perversely, he wouldn’t forgive, him, Max, for weeks, for the crime of having witnessed him make a fool of himself.

Morse looked around the house, taking in the white stucco walls, the exposed timbers in the ceiling, the prints of the River Tay, the clock on the mantelpiece, the fire in the grate, and the overstuffed sofa and chairs as if he had never seen such things before. But then, Morse, Max felt certain, was one of those men who never quite learned how to care for themselves, how to make a proper home for themselves.

“It’s nice,” Morse said.

“Well. It’s home,” Max replied airily, leading Morse further into the house.

The last time Morse had been there, Max had breezed him through, out into the garden, but tonight, he sat him down at the small table just outside the galley kitchen, next to a window overlooking a plum tree that was just falling into silhouette in the gathering darkness outside.

Morse sat ramrod straight on the edge of his seat, looking as if he might still make a run for it, while Max turned back into the open kitchen and prepared him a plate. If he knew Morse, he hadn’t had a meal in . . .

. . . well . . .

. . . since the last time he had had a meal.

Fortunately, Morse had come just at the right time; the food was still warm, so it took no time at all for Max to prepare a plate of roast chicken, potatoes and vegetables and to set it before him.

“You made this?” Morse asked.

On another occasion, Max might have been tempted to answer the question with some wry retort.

_No, Morse, the good fairies of the woods left it in the oven for me._

But on this night, Max didn’t dignify the question with an answer; instead, he simply sat down in the chair across from him with a cup of tea.

Whatever had brought Morse to his door could wait. At least until the man had gotten a decent meal. He sensed that Morse would speak of it, of whatever it was, when he was ready. Be that in fifteen minutes or five hours, it was all the same to Max. He wasn’t on shift until the morning. He could spare the time. As much as Morse needed.

And his instincts weren’t wrong. Morse didn’t seem much up to talking, really, but rather, he simply sat there quietly, his stubborn jaw working steadily, as if eating were a lot of work.

But that was all right. The silence that stretched between them was a comfortable one, a companionable silence, punctuated by the cozy crackle of the fire in the grate.

It was a rare thing, seeing Morse so still. Usually, Morse’s eyes were everywhere, noting the titles of the books on a shelf, the number of placings at a table, the hat left on an armchair. Or darting about as he pawed through papers and opened drawers.

But tonight, Morse kept his eyes cast down, concentrating on the plate before him.

It gave Max ample time to think of what he might say, once Morse's meal was finished.

Because it was becoming clear that he would eventually have to say _something._

But instead, he found his head was full of other thoughts, of scraps of medieval texts and poetry.

The science of the Middle Ages was laughable, and sometimes even bizarre, but to call the age a dark one wasn’t accurate, either. For there were certain truths hidden within them, those ancient sciences, profound truths that students of life—unarmed with microscopes and telescopes and a thorough knowledge of the human body—managed still to discern.

The three stages of alchemy for example, Max often felt to be a pertinent metaphor for life. The black phase in which the dross, all that is accidental, is stripped away, the white in which in which matter is purified, and the red in which it’s utterly transformed.

Morse was in a black stage if ever there was one. The loss of his position of detective, which had for so long been the core of his identity, the loss of his own flat in which to play his records, the loss of his mentor, the loss even of that idea of himself as someone who stood up for the underdog, when it was so clear that he blamed himself, at least in part, for the death of young George Fancy. 

And then Morse was looking at him. 

“I never said ‘thank you’ for coming to my concert, either,” he said. 

Max frowned. It seemed odd that, after all of these years, he should bring up that night, when Max had just been remembering it.

Or perhaps not. Morse was in a similar place now as he was then, two steps backward, living in a station house exile— and he had that same fey look, just the first traces of it, kindling there in his eyes. 

Max wasn’t sure what Morse wanted, exactly.

Perhaps more than he had to give.

Morse, he felt, was someone with whom love would be a case of all or nothing. And such a love was not Max's to offer, even if he wanted to, what with the world arranged such as it was. Anything that could ever grow between them would always have to be a whisper of a love, a cautious love, one of exchanged glances and discreet meetings. One more like a quiet and understated little verse of Houseman’s rather than the passionate and operatic production of which Morse was most likely all too capable. 

Max was hardly given to thinking of himself as a Shakespearean ingénue, but well could he understand Beatrice’s reluctance to accept the Prince.

_“No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.” _

“I don’t know what you must have thought of me,” Morse said.

Max grimaced. Whether Morse was referring to not thanking him, or for the bit after, as he had handed him his glass, he wasn’t sure.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” Max said, an answer that he had meant to be reassuring, but that, after he said the words, he found came out rather flat, as if they could be construed another way entirely, as if he meant that he hadn’t thought of him at all.

Morse seemed to flinch a bit at that, and Max could have kicked himself.

Perhaps neither of them was good at this sort of thing.

Whatever this was.

“Here,” Max said. “Go sit on the sofa with your tea, while I clear this away. You said you came to discuss the case, didn’t you? We haven’t even touched on it.”

Morse looked momentarily confused. Had he said that? Had he said he wanted to discuss the case? He himself wasn’t sure.

It was a sweet and slightly daffy look, that crossed Morse’s face, the imperious features flustered with confusion.

Max felt a tinge of guilt, mixed with a wave of affection for the man. It was for Morse’s own good. It was clear by now that Morse had no real pretext for coming here, and if he, Max, didn’t give the man some excuse for coming, he was sure Morse would regret it all later.

And Morse, he felt, had had enough regrets.

Max picked up Morse’s plate from off the table.

“Here,” Morse said, jumping up, suddenly springing to life. “Let me help.”

“All right,” Max said.

In truth, Morse wasn’t as much a help as a hindrance, as he didn’t know quite where anything belonged, but it seemed to soothe the fellow, and Max found it was nice, really, having him there, always standing in front of the drawer he required access to.

At last, Max fixed them up with two glasses of Scotch and settled them on the couch before the fire. Now, this, felt entirely natural: two colleagues sitting down together to discuss the day’s events.

Or, conversely, it could feel like something else entirely….

Well….

“So,” Max said, briskly. “How is the case going?”

“Hmmmmmm,” Morse said. He took a sip of his drink, which Max had made certain was heavier on the ice than on the alcohol, and said, “Box says it’s open and shut, all the result of a love triangle gone awry, and that’s that. Funny how his name is Box, isn’t it? Everything is open and shut with him, everything so neatly packed away inside solid edges.”

“And you think there's more to it?” Max asked. 

“Yes,” Morse said, at once. “As long as these poison pen letters are circulating about, who knows what tragedy they might excite next?”

He looked meditatively into the fire. 

“It’s such a beautiful place, Chington Green, on the surface of things. White picket fences and red roses, tidy store fronts with robin’s egg blue signs and gleaming gold letters, not a scrap of rubbish on the pavement, all as picturesque and as quaint as a scene on a postcard. But it’s like an apple that’s_ too_ shiny,_ too_ perfect, _too_ fire bright red. You take a bite, and inside, the rot.”

Morse sighed then, heavily.

“They’re cruel, these letters. Why write such things? Why send them?”

Max said nothing, thinking it must be a rhetorical question. 

“I don’t. . . .” Morse paused, as if ready to give a confession. “I don’t really .... _understand_ people, sometimes.”

“Mmmmmmm,” Max said. 

Morse turned and looked at him, then, with forthright eyes. “Why do they do it, do you think?” he asked.

Max raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. So. Not a rhetorical question. Morse honestly wanted to know the answer. 

“Who can say?” Max said. “Jealousy? Insecurity? Someone wanting to feel better about themselves by lording it over, or belittling, someone else? Someone trying to assuage his or her own unhappiness by bringing others into it, so they can have a little company?”

Morse looked a little pained at that. “I suppose,” he said.

Then, Morse turned and looked into the fire. For a moment, he closed his eyes for a little longer than a blink and then opened them again, as one does when one is fighting the edges of sleep. It seemed, too, that, as they were talking, Morse had slowly begun to lean over—rather like a slender tree growing too near the water's edge— sinking into the plush, forest-green throw pillow beside him. 

“Well,” Max said. “'Men are the devils of the earth,' as the saying goes.”

Inwardly, Max winced. Back to quotes, was he? The last thing the chap needed was Schopenhauer.

“Hmmmmm,” Morse said.

They sat together, letting the silence again fall between them, Morse’s eyes watching the fire, seeming to settle, to calm. He closed them again for a moment longer than a blink, as though he might nod off. And then he opened them. And then they once more drifted closed. 

Max didn’t know what Morse wanted, exactly. 

But he did know, for now, what Morse needed. 

Watching Morse out of the corner of his eye, Max realized that the man was simply exhausted. He remembered his visit to Whitney all of those long years ago—the banging of the old radiator pipes, the shouts in the corridor, the sharp taps of shoe soles as the men came and went on and off shift, the ribald laughter slamming through the silence at unexpected moments. Morse was a person who needed solitude at times, who needed to sit alone with his music. How much peace, how much sleep, was the man getting, living out at the section house?

So Max said nothing more, but only sat and listened to the crackle of the fire, and waited as Morse seemed to fall more heavily into his tilt, until his eyes seemed to close for longer than they were open, until he was breathing deeply, and his eyes fell softly closed. Until his face relaxed, so that he looked much younger, suddenly, beneath the mustache. Until he looked much as he had when Max had first met him on that sunlit hill years ago.

In a few more minutes, Morse was beyond the pale, his chest rising and falling, his mouth hanging slightly open, lips parted, in a look that all at once made Max want to laugh, and made his mouth run dry. 

In a moment, he would get up and find an afghan for Morse. Drape it over him and head off to bed for the night.

But for now, he was content to sit here, to watch the fire, to listen to the unfamiliar sounds of another's deep breathing, the rhythm of which seemed to still his, until his eyes, too, felt heavy, and he closed them, resting them for just a moment. 

And then he heard a voice.

Max opened his eyes, and the room was dark. The fire had gone completely out.

It had seemed as if only a few minutes had passed, but it was clear at once to Max—from the fire, from the crick in his neck, and from the darkness and the placing of the moon outside of the window—that hours had passed, that he had nodded off there, next to Morse on the sofa.

He looked to Morse. Was it he who had spoken?

Morse was leaning against the pillow, his eyes open, bright in the light of the moon from the window, but dazed, too, as if he still lingered in that sleep world in which all was permittable.

“What’s wrong with me Max?” Morse asked.

“What’s that, Morse?”

“I asked, ‘what’s wrong with me?’”

Max frowned. “Why? Do you feel unwell?” 

“No,” Morse said. “I mean, ‘What’s wrong with me?'”

And suddenly, Max understood what Morse meant.

“There’s nothing wrong with you," he said. 

And he found he could say this with conviction; he wasn’t in any way "handling" Morse.

Morse was difficult, to be sure. But there was nothing_ wrong_ with him.

There were, on the other hand, a great many things wrong with the world.

Morse’s only trouble was, he hadn’t quite figured out how to make the compromises that most people learn to make when they realize that fact. 

Morse scowled softly, then, as if gathering his thoughts. “Then what is it about me that . . .” And then he allowed the sentence to fall away.

Max began to feel a bit as if he was on unsteady ground, in that soft and mutable land of four in the morning, when dreams and the waking world meet. He began to feel as if these were, perhaps, Morse’s most private thoughts, his most private fears, and that perhaps the fellow only half-realized that he was speaking them aloud.

“Why do I …” Morse began. “What do I do to set everyone off?”

For a moment, Max wasn’t sure how to answer. And then the answer came to him at once, as if he had always known the right thing, the true thing to say.

“You haven’t set _me_ off,” he said quietly.

Morse tilted his head, so that he was looking at him, his blue eyes like those kaleidoscopes of long ago. 

“We are friends, aren’t we?” he asked. “Not just _colleagues._”

He said the final word with and odd little twist of distaste, and Max knew at once what Morse was thinking of—of that afternoon, at the cordon, when Inspector Thursday—who Max knew Morse looked upon almost as a father—had referred to him before Box as simply “a former colleague from Cowley.”

“Yes,” Max said.

Morse smiled, and a tension that Max had not noticed there in Morse's shoulders seemed to ease, and he sank deeper into the cushions, staring blankly, but sleepily and contentedly, before him.

It was enough. To go any further on his night would set Morse into a spin of second-guessing. If Morse went any further, said anything more, Max was certain he would hate himself for it.

“And as we are friends,” Max said, “That means you have the duty to allow me to regale you with the tales of my latest fishing trip.”

It was the right thing to say. He was rewarded with that twitch of a smile, as if Morse knew just what it was he was doing, gently steering him away from going further than he was ready.

And so Max talked on into the quiet hours between night and morning, about the River Tay, and the rocks and rush of water and the leaping salmon, as Morse’s eyes grew heavier, his breathing evened, as if Max was singing him a lullaby.

But speaking of fishing made Max think of something else, too, of a time when they had stood on a river bank, and Morse had asked him a singular question. 

“Where do you stand with all that?” Morse had asked.

“Suicide?” Max asked. 

“Love," Morse corrected. 

“Bit early in the day for metaphysics, isn’t it?” Max replied. And then, because it seemed that Morse had wanted something more, he added, ‘_And one was fond of me, and all are slain.’”_

And Morse had looked bewildered. 

“Love and fishing," Max said. “Sooner or later it all comes down to the same thing. The one that got away.”

But what Max didn’t tell Morse, and what he wasn’t telling him now, amidst the tales of his remarkable near-successes, was that it wasn’t always as simple as that. It wasn't always about the one that got away. 

Once, while salmon fishing on the River Tay, Max had managed to catch an enormous brown trout, with speckles along its back as incandescent in the sunshine as jeweled pebbles, with an enormous gaping mouth, struggling as if to speak, and a round eye like glass, looking at him with a fierce intelligence.

It thrashed and contorted in his grip, fighting to break free, to return to the water. It was too large for Max's cooler, and what's more, Max began to fear he might lose hold of the thing. He didn't have the heart to watch the poor creature—at once so powerful and so fragile—dash itself to the rocks in its throes of panic. So instead, he deftly removed the hook and then lowered it down toward the water. And then it leapt from his hands, shooting off with a splash, and darted away. 

No.

It wasn't all about the ones that got away. 

It was also about the ones we release, because they are too much for us to hold. 


End file.
